Here’s a bunch of new scans from Next Generation magazine, found on the great Retromags.com: 01/95, 03/95, 06/95, 07/95, 11/95, 01/96, 03/96 and 09/96.

looking thru the new scans it also showed the 08/95 scan to and is it just me or does the Red Alarm screen shot (very small) show solid wireframes (as opposed to the see thru wireframe in the released game).
My guess would be that if they were solid then the game most likely slowed down during hectic play so to keep the frame rate up they removed the faces and just kept the wires.
I love this game and don’t have any problem seeing the objects, ships, enemies etc as wires but would be cool to see if it was originally solid.
Are there other pre-release red alarm screens that maybe show this more? (mild nudge there if anyone else wants to search too) 😀

Looks like the same old wireframes to me? Besides, if the polygons were filled with a solid color, it would be stupid to fill them all with black 😛

I don’t know the programming for wireframe in Vb but rather than take up space solid filling the faces it could be more efficient to just hide the detail behind, in which case the faces would appear black.
But then its all academic as you are most likely right and its just the standard screen shot.
Does anyone know if its less memory or programming to just hide rather than solid fill the faces? or is it even an option? Again all academic as I’m not gonna be programming, but is of interest.

Hmm.. if you fill the faces then you can just draw everything from back to front and simply fill over what’s already in the background. Not so complicated, but requires lots of drawing which is slow.

On the other hand, if you want to hide instead of drawing you would draw from front to back, but then you would have to clip every object against what’s already on screen. Less drawing, but more complicated and time consuming math instead. It could probably still be faster though.

Ta for the info Dan, interesting.
I know in Solidworks its slower to rotate & zoom etc when you choose to have the model displayed in wireframe hidden rather than rendered. 😀